ALL THE WORLD ‘s A PAGE: EDITORIAL NOTES ON ORALITY IN TRANSLATION
[#FromTheArchive: 2014]
The following essay accompanied the publication of Steve Danziger’s Moons of Jupiter / Tales of the Schminke Tub in 2014— now available for free or by donation download from the OS Open Access library. Editorial / production notes, alongside translator or author notes and interviews, have always been an essential element of the OS’s strategic approach to pre-empting a need for an access-and archive facing publication model, in the face of anticipating shifts to scholarship and public study of born-digital media, with physical ephemera and personal affects often no longer existing off of digital platforms and devices.
The explicit inclusion of these sorts of materials alongside each publication has been written about at length but there are many critical editorial works that I’ve penned that have not been seen except by those who worked on these projects or those who read not only their content but their front and back matter. However, they represent and document the arc of the OS as a project in and unto itself.
Here, I’m speaking explicitly to the role of the published dramatic text, thinking about what role it plays (or has played or could play) culturally and what it (potentially) means to become a producer and documenter of this sort of work, as well as more generally considering the Book as technology, a through line for the entire publishing experiment.
This project put into public print circulation a pair of short plays for a single actor, originally performed by Haskell King at Center Stage, NY, in 2004–05, as a production of the TerraNOVA Collective. It was in fact King’s performance of Moons that inspired the playwright to pen Schminke — and we were lucky enough to have Haskell return as our special guest for the release performance of these works at VON on Bleecker Street in New York City, on December 6, 2014.
It’s worth noting too that VON has long been a supporter of independent arts and publishing in New York, and for many years has enthusiastically and generously offered their spaces for free to host OS and many other events — for which I am endlessly grateful. These sorts of interpersonal community exchanges of resources — space in particular — in a city like New York make all the difference for DIY projects running on willpower (ie not $$$), and I want to take a minute to celebrate those like the team at VON who know this and make it possible.
In 2012, the artist we know as Beck released Song Reader, an album in the form of a book of sheet music, to considerable consternation, criticism, and a smattering of praise — the strongest memory of the first reviews I read is that while admired as an artistic move within certain circles that the choice smacked of…pretension.
I bring this up now, in the publication of another form of sensory performance translated into text, because as a publisher I am interested not only in making beautiful, thought-provoking objects, but even moreso in the public act represented by the choice to document, archive, distribute — to reify — creative practice, that is, to concretize artistic impulse as commodity/object. And, crucially, in the relationship of book-art-object to the role of hypermedia-sensory-objects in this time and place.
Every book published represents an opportunity to engage with the how, what, and why of the use and place of the printed page in our ever-shifting cultural landscape — even moreso books that ossify on the page creative endeavors designed to be received by multiple sensory “channels” (that is to say, ears, eyes, body, and what happens in our perception when all are engaged.)
There is naïve benefit in coming to publish a book of plays as someone who primarily publishes and designs poetics and fiction (but who comes from many years of theatrical and dramaturgical training) — while scripts have often crossed my path, in the form of photocopied sides clearly intended for use by actors and directors, it’s been a while since I deeply engaged with the play-as-book form… and this is the first time I really looked at it and considered its unusual cultural role.
The past few years of publishing, editing, performing and engaging in dialogue with creators of all disciplines have seen myself and/via The OS moving into a space of multi-channel production and documentation that reintroduces a primacy to orality and audio/ performance as not only origin of all text but essential to a contemporary consideration of the page.
It is crucial to remind ourselves that the book is not counter to technology but indeed one of — if not the — most enduring technological innovations to date, one that holds us psychologically very much in its thrall. And one that, in a backwards way, influences the way many of us perceive and judge perception in any medium, so central has it been to our learning process. (The young people we’re seeing now, whose learning environments have been consistently cross-channel from their earliest days, represent in many ways a real evolution for us from this book-centric experience. But I digress.)
The point in this instance is, when Steve Danziger approached me with the possibility of publishing MOONS of JUPITER/TALES from the SCHMINKE TUB, I did not yet realise how singularly well timed this project was situ- ated within this particular moment in my own /The OS’s creative evolution, given our current focus on the question of the published page as, essentially, a still-clumsy, imperfect approximation of orality/performance.
Here in the design of play-as-book, leaving convention (as usual) behind, and with an unusually game playwright as co-captain, we began a consideration of what it means to design a play for the page — contending and taking as project the crucial subtleties differentiating audience in a theatrical environment from reader in a literary one. The elephant in the room is and was time, and in a way we can think about a standard script (or play-as-book that retains script-convention) as constructed in a similar way to HTML code as it relates to space: nothing is left to the imagination. Negative space (or here, time) is not understood as having value; every character including time and space are given direction and durational cues, whereas in fiction (or non coded text), time (or space) can be left and filled at the reader’s discretion. And of course as we know, poetics in particular enjoys a much more flexible, reader-driven relationship to flow and pacing.
To say the playwright who chooses to engage minimally with stage direction and set consideration has done the same as a poet or writer of fiction who has chosen to create thick, unpunctuated blocks of text with little to no line breakage, and therefore to treat these texts the same on the page is tantamount to an act of mistranslation, crucially leaving out the relationship of the script to the middle-persons of director, actor, and crew, and the decisions on the part of these creative practitioners to which the audience member is privy.
Remember those games of analogy from your school days, in which PLAY is to AUDIENCE MEMBER as BOOK is to READER? Where does PLAY is to READER fit into this game? With difficulty, it turns out, if you’re thinking about the play as a social and cultural vehicle that is at danger of becoming increasingly decontextualized, removed from the intersectionality of its production in a particular time and place.
And, as the Beck example shows, we as a public have a very different relationship to audio- visual media than we do to anything in page form — a relationship to voluntary reading often drawing up contentions of class and privilege, elitism and education, to name a few. But let’s come away from the politics for long enough to simply figure out the mechanics of the thing. Now, often in postmodern theatre (as in this case) the playwright has chosen to remove the traditional devices of highly specified costume and set, leaving a stage bare or with only a few props, but these lacks are too conventions of an evolving history in which their absence is perhaps equally or more significant than specification.
A play put on “here” and simply with “A MAN” that does not specify time and place will bring more to its audience member than the convention-as-lack script can translate to a reader. So…what to do? In this case, in addition to my own standard of mirrored left and right facing pages, the choice was to translate the script into a space of poetics — reintroducing line breaks and negative space in relationship to time, and creating coded textual types of varying weight to differentiate between words that would be heard by an audience member vs. those that served solely as cues to theatrical practitioners / those which would be perceived, by the audience, via their other senses.
We found ourselves in particular grappling with the phonic difficulties of the dialect Steve had given the speaker in Moons, which was at first written with a degree of intentional inconsistency, adding humor to its original performance as a ‘bad accent,’ but that without instruction did not always translate well for a reader, translating instead into awkward tonal moments that threatened to break the ability of an easily paced, natural experience for the internal ear. But after many many drafts of subtle vowel changes, we left well enough alone, hoping the reader has enough cues to make the “sound” satisfying.
It makes me wonder if we aren’t doing playwrights a disservice by not treating these works more as we do other sensory productions, wherein audio-visual receipt by the public is the norm — where the socio-cultural problematics of translation to the page is a surprising exception to the rule. How has the screenplay escaped being normatively treated as equal, textually, to a book in public and academic settings? One imagines it is because of the popularity of the movie as a cultural standard, vs. the play which still struggles to revive its early role as central organ for social commentary for ALL classes, not only those who read.
Reconsiderations of all our forms are necessary for us to fully own the potential power of this courageous choice to keep making, goddammit, against all odds. Thanks be to Steve, and those playwrights who encourage us to laugh at our own ridiculousness, as surely I am after this preposterous essay….right? Hopefully you’ll find some balance here, perhaps get inspired to make something that questions the way you’ve been making it all along. And surely you will continue to see myself and The Operating System working to discern how we might better integrate new technologies into the “publication” of plays and other oral traditions …perhaps in the very near future.
bionote on the below: this is the bio I was using (sometimes) in 2014. It’s been changed as many times as I’ve had different places, spaces, industries, disciplines, performances, bylines to attach it to. I leave it intact here as an archival trace. I use they/them pronouns but I don’t want to wipe my history as an AFAB person who lived a female experience for nearly 40 years, using this name, and trying on myriad descriptors / identities / understandings of myself as awareness and articulation evolved (as they continue to). This piece coming #FromTheArchive, exhumed and reconsidered
LYNNE DESILVA-JOHNSON
Lynne DeSilva-Johnson is an educator and interdisciplinary creator confused by Adherence to Titles. If forced, she might admit to being a conceptual artist, but then might argue you are, too. She works in text, mixed multimedia, bookmaking, construction, printmaking, typography, photography, sound, digital manipulation, and on installations incorporating these in tandem. She has been published widely, and has performed/ been shown at The Dumbo Arts Festival, Naropa University, Bowery Arts and Science, The NYC Poetry Festival, The Poet- ry Project, Undercurrent Projects, Mellow Pages, The New York Public Library, Page 22, Holland Tunnel Gallery, Launchpad BK, Eyebeam, This Must Be The Place, and the Cooper Union, among others. A regular host and curator of events in NYC, Lynne is the Managing Editor of THE OPERATING SYSTEM, and also your brunch server. (Sorry, no substitutions.) She’s blogged at The Trouble With Bartleby, (a name shared with her chapbook imprint), since 2003. Find her at@onlywhatican.
